Flow of viscous fluid along a nonlinearly stretching curved surface

Abstract

This paper focuses on the flow of viscous fluid over a curved surface stretching with nonlinear power-law velocity. The boundary layer equations are transformed into ordinary differential equations using suitable non-dimensional transformations. These equations are solved numerically using shooting and Runge-Kutta (RK) methods. The impact of non-dimensional radius of curvature and power-law indices on the velocity field, the pressure and the skin friction coefficient are investigated. The results deduced for linear stretching are compared with the published work to validate the numerical procedure. The important findings are: (a) Slight variation of the curvature of the stretching sheet increases the velocity and the skin friction coefficient significantly. (b) The nonlinearity of the stretching velocity increases the skin friction. (c) The results for linear stretching and the flat surface are the special cases of this problem. Keywords: Boundary layer flow, Curved surface, Nonlinearly stretching surface, Variable curvature